One Day at a Time Is a Show That Makes the World Bigger

The Netflix comedy is a big-hearted answer to a cultural moment determined to do the opposite.

One Day at a Time is a show about questions. It hides this well—its throwback format is an immaculate re-creation of the sort of socially conscious multi-camera sitcom that its executive producer, Norman Lear, pioneered in the '70s, the kind that shows like Seinfeld would eventually rebel against and force out of fashion. Because of this, watching One Day at a Time feels strange and out of place, like being stuck in a Pleasantville-esque time warp. And then, as the show confidently begins to tackle things like PTSD and mental health and queer issues, the laugh track becomes subversive. Because the laugh track isn't important, even as the show makes you laugh, loudly and often. The questions are.

In its third season, out today, One Day at a Time continues to follow the life of Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado), an Iraq war vet working as a nurse and trying to raise her kids and take care of her mom on a single paycheck as she studies to become a nurse practitioner and maybe also date. It's a lot! But when your mom is played by living legend Rita Moreno and your wealthy doofus of a boss is played by a hilariously game Stephen Tobolowsky, all that stress makes for tremendously good comedy in the oldest of schools. The show, having hit its stride long ago, continues to be one of the warmest, most humane shows you can watch on Netflix, finding ways to make one of the most unsubtle television genres a stage for unexpected nuance.

There's a thing that can happen when you cross boundaries of class and race to learn the concerns of people more privileged than you. Everything that takes place on a level outside of your threshold for "just getting by" sounds like a champagne problem—you hear people talk about therapists and micro-aggressions, and it all becomes very easy to dismiss, because they are all outside of the all-encompassing, fundamental pressure of basic shit like making rent. In its comedy—as Rita Moreno's Lydia Riera dances and learns teen slang, as Penelope Alvarez goes to group therapy and tries to be a supportive mother to her lesbian daughter—One Day at a Time works to make the world bigger for the people it tries to represent.

Its writers, headed up by showrunners Gloria Calderón Kellett and Mike Royce, celebrate Latinx culture in defiance of a political moment that traffics in its demonization—but not at the cost of self-examination. With a cast that spans three generations, it retrofits the shopworn generation-gap sitcom trope to both highlight and re-appraise Latin-American culture, wrestling with attitudes of homophobia and machismo with the same big-hearted humanity with which it approaches mental health and parenting. It's honest about cultural shortcomings as it works to move past them, frank in the ways it has its characters unsure of how to move forward and be better, but always aware that there's someone they can ask for help.

Being Latinx in America is largely an exercise in feeling ignored as you're denied agency over your own fate and shut out of conversations about things like mental health and burnout, simply because survival in working-class America is hard enough. Poverty makes your world smaller, and the gospel of wellness and self-care is often for people with money to spend. But we're whole, complete people, deserving of the time and effort it takes to ask ourselves: Are we okay? How can we support each other better? Is there anything we need to unlearn to make things better for the brown kids who will come after us in a world that doesn't seem to be any more receptive to them?

That's the brilliant sleight of hand One Day at a Time pulls in embracing the explicit social consciousness of Norman Lear sitcoms. In having zero qualms about its blunt lesson-learning, it teaches a lesson that no one's really bothered to teach me: that I don't have to settle for less.